Moratín's Circle of Friends: Intellectual Ferment in Spain, 1780–1800

Abstract

Moratin’s Circle ofFriends: Intellectual Ferment in Spain, 1780-1800 JOHN DO WLING Juan Antonio Melon, in some “disorderly notes” on the life of Leandro Fernandez de Moratin, mentions how there developed around Moratin during the 1780’s a coterie of half a dozen young men in their twenties. Besides Melon and Moratin, they were Pedro Estala and his fellow Piarist Padre Navarrete, Leon de Arroyal, and Juan Pablo Forner. The relation of Moratin, Melon, and Estala, especially in later years, has always been known; but the group as a whole has not been studied in literary or intellectual history. Moratin and Forner have been treated separately, but their relationship has not been clarified. Leon de Arroyal was, it would seem, intentionally assigned by government authorities in his own lifetime to an obscurity from which he has emerged only in the last decade. I myself must set aside Padre Navarrete. He has not been satisfactorily identified, and he seems not to have distin­ guished himself in the intellectual life of this time.1 The period 1780 to 1800 embraces the young manhood of these intellectuals. For Moratin it means the period from the age 165 166 / JOHN DOWLING of twenty to forty, and it was more or less the same age for the others. Juan Pablo Forner died at the age of forty-one, before the new century began. Historically, the period covers the final years of the reign of Carlos III; the new reign of Carlos IV and his consort Maria Luisa, who are known to us so well through the paintings of Goya; the trauma of the French Revolution; and the rise of Manuel Godoy, a man seven years younger than Moratin, to the pinnacle of his power. Melon and Leon de Arroyal were walking one day in 1781 in the Calle de Alcala near the point where it intersects the Paseo del Prado. There they encountered two young Piarists, Pedro Estala and Padre Navarrete, in the company of Leandro Fernandez de Moratin. Estala had known Melon at Salamanca, and he intro­ duced him to his friend Leandro. “I found Moratin taciturn and reserved,” Melon recalled, “but I could tell that he took a liking to me. . . . Among all of us,” he continued, “a friendship was estab­ lished which lasted all our lives.”2 At the time, Moratin was twenty-one years old. His father had died the previous year, and he was living at home with his mother and working as a jeweler at his uncle’s shop in Madrid. He had published his narrative poem La toma de Granada por los Reyes Catolicos {The Capture of Granada by the Catholic Sovereigns; 1779), which was printed at the expense of the Royal Spanish Academy because it was awarded the accessit, sl sort of second or consolation prize, in a contest. Pedro Estala was a Manchegan from the town of Daimiel be­ tween Manzanares and Ciudad Real. Two of his brothers became Dominicans, and he was a Piarist friar, an escolapio in Spanish. He was born in 1759 and hence was a year older than Moratin. We may suppose that he and Navarrete taught at the Escuelas Pias de San Fernando in the Calle de Lavapies, although neither pious devotion nor teaching boys seems ever to have loomed large in Pedro Estala’s life. Juan Antonio Melon became Moratin’s closest friend. If the age he gave the French police in 1827 was correct, he was born in 1763 and hence was three years younger than Leandro.3 Moratin Circle ofFriends I 167 Oldest of the group was Melon’s friend Leon de Arroyal, who was about twenty-six when he met Moratin. Arroyal, who had also studied at Salamanca, had that year of 1781 published his first book, a devotional in Castilian verse translation of the short office of Our Lady according to the Roman Breviary.4 The sixth member did not join the coterie until the end of the following year 1782. He was Juan Pablo Forner. He was about the same age as Arroyal, and the two had been fellow students at Salamanca. Later, Arroyal married Rita Piquer, a cousin of Forner ’s mother. In...